


You of All Men.

by VictoryCandescence



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drawing from ACD Canon, F/M, Gen, Post Reichenbach, Reunion, Sherlock's POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-18
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-02 04:17:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictoryCandescence/pseuds/VictoryCandescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock climbs out of the chasm of his mind, unsure of how far he fell or what he’ll find when he reaches the top.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You of All Men.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is meant to be a companion piece with [A Thousand Apologies.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/360457)

 

 

 

_Beeping_ , thought Sherlock. _ I hear beeping_.

Where  _ is _ that infernal sound coming from?  _ Focus, man_.

Hospital. He’s in hospital. He doesn’t know whether this fact should make him feel relieved or much more paranoid and frightened, but at the moment he couldn’t muster much more than a small rumbly groan, lost inside the bottom of his throat.

He tried to open his eyes, only to find them hopelessly crusted shut. With sleep? Blood? Likely both. Now that his thoughts had turned to his face, he felt a persistent thrumming of pain, reaching from his head through to the very tips of his fingers and toes. Every piece of him felt tender and swollen, and was only dulled by the telltale chemical shroud of painkillers. Strong ones. That means –

Yes. There in the crook of his right arm, he could feel the needle embedded in his skin; another in the back of his hand, the tape pulling against his skin uncomfortably. 

No, he’d said. No needles.

He dimly remembered trying to speak, to tell the bodies around him not to stick him, but he found there was a tube thrust down his throat, and he couldn’t do much more than moan or breathe. With considerably disproportionate effort for the simple action, he’d cracked one eye open a sliver. A woman with long blond hair and crinkled eyes had held him down with big, strong hands.  _ Mum_, he thought.  _ Two kids, likely rowdy boys_. A young man with spiky dark hair and furrowed brows was on the other side of him, sliding in that hateful needle.  _ New here, recently finished his training_. Sherlock hoped with a perverse sort of spite that he was the lad’s first bloody, truly violent case, and that he’d have a nightmare or two about the mess his face must look.

Sherlock tried to fight the chemically-induced sleep, tried to stay conscious. The other nurses had gone now, and only one figure remained. He couldn’t see him, but he could hear him adjusting the tubes, checking the bags of fluid, recording the numbers on the various monitors to which he was tethered. He tried to move, but his body wouldn’t obey. He felt the man’s hands touch his forearm: roughened fingertips, short nails. Small, strong hands. 

“Who are you, Mr Crick?” murmured the man. His voice was low, weary, barely more than a whisper.

It may have been the delirium of the medication, or Sherlock’s own pain-addled brain, but the man sounded – well, he sounded like John.

Sherlock willed his own hands to work, but all he could manage was a tiny twitch, just enough to curl his fingertips to brush the man’s warm wrist. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t speak or smell or even hear very well. But before he slipped into unconsciousness again, he had to touch – use at least one of his senses, grasp some kind of tactile information.

It was then that he felt the medication move through his veins like a sluice of warmth, and he had no choice but to succumb to that awful, empty and dreamless slumber.

 

\---

 

_...is Mary_ , a quiet voice was saying, and it was full of warmth and fondness.  _ I don’t know who you are, or if you like blokes or birds, but sorry for you mate, my girl’s the best. Honey-coloured hair, eyes like a grey morning sky. She has freckles, and not just on her face. She’s round in all the right places, and the same height as me, so I don’t have to stoop down or go up on my toes to kiss her. She’s kind, and witty, and I swear she can read about something in the morning and know how to do it by teatime. Her voice is like the pages of a book being turned. I wrote that to her once, in a love note. She liked that I described her like that. I suppose because she loves books. I’m no poet, but you can’t fault a man for being romantic about what he loves. I love her, so I write things about her in this little notepad she keeps by the bed. It’s stupid, but I guess love does that to you. It makes you act like an idiot sometimes... _

 

\---

  
It must have been through sheer force of will and astronomical stubbornness that he roused himself into an approximation of wakefulness now, countless hours later. Or perhaps it was that incessant bloody  _ beeping_. 

What was that, his heart? His heart was fine, for god’s sake.

The needles, though. They had to go. He and needles were not friends anymore. That had been decided a long time ago. He couldn’t seem to be able to get his brain sorted, but he knew this fact was important.

Sherlock found that if he concentrated very hard, he could move his arms. Ignoring the pain, he flopped his arm over, tangled his fingers into the tubes and pulled. He hissed as the tiny pins snagged, then pulled free of his body. One more spot of pain made no difference to him. He tried to speak again and found he could, though his throat felt acidic and raw and his voice rasped.

“No needles!” he said rustily, and untangled his hand from the tubes that now dangled in a knot off the rail of his bed. He wriggled his arm, now free from poking and the pull of tape, and slid the pulse monitoring clip from his finger, hoping to stop the beeping. But unfortunately, it only turned the beeping into a steady whine, and sent two nurses rushing in.

“No needles!” Sherlock shouted again, now that he had an audience. “I promised. No more needles ever again! He was  _ promised_.” His voice was louder now, though the words ran together, and his mouth didn’t quite form the shape of them correctly because of his swollen lip. They held him down and stuck the needles back into him, despite his protests. Were these people deaf as well as stupid? Really now...oh...  
  


\---

 

_...crap all over the tables, the counter top_ _,_ said the soothing voice.  _ And yet his room was impeccably clean. Crisp sheets, neat bookshelves, shined floors. He even had these special dividers in his dresser drawers: socks and pants and vests, all arranged in some impenetrable order that only made sense to him. That was everything he did, though. Only ever made sense to him, until he showed you the way he looked at it. ‘Really look,’ he used to say. ‘Observe.’ And when he’d explain it, it would seem so obvious I could kick myself. Brilliant. God, I miss him so bad, still, even after all this time – you think it’d ease but it never really did. I just learned how to live with it, like any other pain. I wish he was here. He’d have known your name soon as you were wheeled down the hallway. All he’d have to do was look at your fingernails, or the way the cuffs of your trousers were frayed... _

 

\---

  
The beeping was back again, the next time Sherlock resurfaced.

_ Think! _ He tried to force his brain out of it’s chemically-induced hibernation. It was such a strange feeling; like he could only  _ really _ concentrate on one thing at a time. Was this what it was like for normal people? Dear god. Following a coherent thread of thought felt like moving through some kind of high-viscosity liquid. These doctors were useless. Rubbish. They should all be sacked, sent back to school, taught a lesson. No wonder why there was only one doctor he ever trusted –

John. 

He felt his brain whirr back to life, and with it a flood of fear.

Sherlock had pursued Sebastian Moran back to London, and Moran – though not as clever as his master – was still able to track Sherlock’s movements. They teetered between hunter and hunted in turn; Sherlock drawing Moran out, Moran slipping past him. They were locked in this sordid game of chess, each dancing on the other’s periphery for weeks. They kept each other carefully in check, until it got too close. Moran was inching nearer and nearer, and Sherlock’s hand was forced when he saw the next move Moran was making to break the stalemate was finding John again. 

So out he went into those odd suburbs, full of blank places, foreboding only to Sherlock in his unique logic: it all seemed so safe, quiet and secure to everyone else, but all Sherlock could see were shameful secrets hidden behind the hedgerows. The empty house he found Moran in looked like all the countless others around it, save for the fact it was positioned in sight lines of the most likely route John would take on his walk home.

Moran was tall and thin, like Sherlock – but solid where Sherlock was sinuous, with bone-coloured hair and eyes that were so dark he couldn’t tell where the pupil ended and the iris began. His bare arms bore dozens of shining white scars, striations like a tiger’s stripes. Sherlock couldn’t tell which ones were given and which were self-inflicted, though he felt there might not be a difference in that distinction. He pulled the kerchief down from around his nose and mouth, gave Sherlock a toothsome smile as if to say,  _ Welcome friend, I’ve been expecting you_. There was a particularly ominous scar that ran diagonally across his mouth, from his left nostril to the right side of his chin, as if someone tried to shush him with a blade instead of a finger.

The sniper rifle strapped across his back glinted in the dim light of the bare room. Sherlock knew enough about this man now to know that the gun was only a minor threat to him, especially at this close range. What he needed to be most wary of was – yes, there it was, hanging at his hip. That hunting knife. He pulled it from its sheath slowly. It was obscenely large, the layered ribbons of hardened metal running along its length like veins.

Sebastian brought the knife close to his face. He pressed the flat of his tongue to the steel of the blade. He never broke eye contact with Sherlock. If he had any doubts as to why Moriarty kept this man close to him, that single gesture banished them all.

_ I am you_ , Sherlock had said to Jim, as he stared into the singularity of his dark eyes.

But Sebastian was the anti-John, thought Sherlock, in almost every way. Tethered to Jim Moriarty through a loyalty borne of mutual insanity and manipulation, not of protection and fondness.  _ Colonel_, they called him, and it’s true that he was a military man himself – he could see the outline of the two metal discs that rested against his sternum beneath his tight black shirt. But Sherlock knew he’d never achieved such a rank, not in any official or decorous way. John was honour and morality, hands that healed and killed only when strictly necessary. Sebastian Moran was deviance and bloodshed, with hands that tortured and killed for the thrumming joy of it and itched to be traced with the scent of entrails.

Jim would have told him  _ no_. Jim would have wanted quick and clean, and that’s how Sherlock knew this was all Sebastian. Sebastian wanted slow and filthy, wanted to feel the heat leaving his body, wanted to slice him open and stick his fingers inside the wound. He wanted to watch the blood vessels burst beneath his skin: purple, blue, and black – each mark, each ounce of blood that spilled from him, each splintering bone, each breath that became more laboured than the last was an homage, an offering to the ghost of Jim Moriarty from the second most dangerous man in London.

Ah, sentiment.

Sherlock knew that it should have been less bloody, less messy and fitful, but he had no time left for eloquence. It was the very first time in his life he came close to understanding crimes committed in the throes of passion: Sebastian, fighting tooth and claw for the vengeance of his dear departed cohort, Sherlock thrashing right back, desperate to end this, to  _ stop this_, to keep him from harming his heart ever again. 

He was the last gossamer thread that had to be broken, the last piece to capture in this hateful game.

There were no words.

There were just fists, and knives, an errant pipe. Hands tightened round throats. 

So much blood. 

It felt as if it went on forever. Sherlock spiralled down and down into the searing pain, certain that they were going to die, both of them, here tonight. He’d accepted it finally, and was almost glad for it as he lay on the blood-slickened floor, his eyes closing on the gasping, dying visage of Sebastian Moran, but inside his own head they opened to –

“John. John Watson!”

His traitorous voice had yet to behave the way he wanted it to, but the swelling on his face seemed to have receded to a point where his maxillofacial muscles were cooperating.

The young spiky-haired nurse was back again.

“John,” Sherlock demanded of him. “Get me John Watson. He’s a doctor. He’s  _ my _ doctor. I need him.” 

The nurse was looking at him, a bit dumbfounded.

“Did you hear me or not? John Watson, he lives in – I think he still – London, in London.” The medicine was still coursing through him, befuddling his thought process, tangling up exactly where he was and what had happened. That wouldn’t do. His hands were easier to control now; he reached across and ripped the needles out as he had done before. 

“Oi!” said the nurse, and lunged forward to repair the damage.  _Oh, so_ that _gets a response_ , thought Sherlock exasperatedly. If his eyes didn’t still hurt so much, he’d have rolled them.

The nurse cleaned the splotches of blood left from yanking out the needles and went to reinsert them. Sherlock was having none of it. He scrabbled at the nurse’s hands, bent up his arms to hide the veins from him, twisted himself away so far that he almost rolled off the bed’s opposite side. The nurse grabbed his shoulders and shoved him firmly back into the pillow.

“Stop it or I’ll have them restrain you,” he said, with a tone of command and finality Sherlock didn’t expect from someone his age. He tried to give him a derisive look, but wasn’t sure it translated through the mess of bandages and contusions his face was currently made up of. He let go of Sherlock’s shoulders, and he stayed still.

“Needles. Get the needles out of me. I hate them.”

“They’re necessary. Leave them be.”

“I  _ promised _ him,” Sherlock said through gritted teeth, not understanding why this was so hard a concept for them to grasp. “No needles.”

“Him who? Look, mate. We don’t even have your real name here. You want to tell us what it is?”

Sherlock remained petulantly silent.

“Do you have any family we can contact? An address, a phone number, anything?

Sherlock wished his eyes weren’t already narrowed by the swelling. He settled for sitting up aggressively straight (even though his ribs twinged in protest) and turning his head away.

“Take. The needles. Out,” he said. Perhaps this was a good bargaining chip. 

“No.”  _ Damn_. “Tell me your name.” 

No. No, he wasn’t sure he was safe yet.

“John. Get me John Watson.” The sedatives were climbing up his circulatory system again. Tiny, tiny molecules invading his blood, dancing waltzes with his platelets. Little fishes swimming through an uphill stream...

The nurse threw him a look of confusion and mild alarm before his face went blurry and the world dropped back into darkness.

 

\---

 

Sherlock woke again, not sure of how much time had passed. He tried to glimpse the window, but the curtains around his bed obscured them and distorted the slant of light. There was no clock in the room that he could see either. Was this a hospital or a prison? He doesn’t even remember how he got here.

He was prepared to die. He had been ready to meet Death since he’d stepped off the roof of St Bart’s; one cannot avoid her forever, especially when he’d already effectively convinced the world (save for two people) that he had already shuffled off this mortal coil. He was sure that was the end of him, fingers still gripped around the handle of that knife, Moran’s own blade which he’d used to dispatch him.

He suspected Mycroft had traced him; that was the most logical explanation. He must have had some thread of surveillance tied to him, probably since he’d come back through London – maybe sooner than that. Now Sherlock was in the unenviable position of holding his brother responsible for his “death”, and owing him his life. Perhaps all the tubes and wires in him were apt; he certainly felt like a puppet at the moment.

But that wasn’t quite it, was it? He wasn’t being toyed with; his brother wouldn’t waste his precious time. Could it be that Mycroft actually  _ cared_? Should this be construed as an apology for what he’d done? Mummy wasn’t around anymore; he had no one in front of which he must feel obligated to save face. This wasn’t like when he was an addict. This was different.

Sherlock had realised while he was dead that for the first time, he had people in the world that he well and truly cared about. That meant something had changed, some volatile variable he hadn’t accounted for. Surely then it couldn’t be a great leap of logic to think that people cared about him now as well. Including Mycroft.

This brought him back on the original rail of his thoughts. Mycroft had sent the paramedics to his location. The paramedics had brought him here, likely the closest hospital, so – Newham, if he remembered correctly. Yes. Outside London proper, but apparently with a remarkably capable A&E department. The doctor that he couldn’t quite see, he felt his hands –  _ those _ were the hands that demonstrably saved his life. 

Sherlock heard the door handle turn, slowly. That nurse again, sod him. Sherlock looked down, saw the needles were in his arms again. 

_ Focus._

His head swam with the muddle of the chemicals, dulling his senses, unraveling the skein of his thoughts. Pain, at least, was focus. He’d take the pain over this fuzzy chemical swaddling any day.

“Needles,” Sherlock rasped once more, hoping that nurse was the shadow moving slowly, cautiously just beyond the curtain. Maybe he’d finally scared him a bit. Good. Sherlock sat up and squared his shoulders in satisfaction. Maybe this time what he was saying would get through his excessively calcified cranium. “I promised him. No more, never again.”

Sherlock tangled his fingers in the tubes again, and yanked. Just then the curtain was flung open. But instead of the boyish spiky-haired nurse, a hallucination appeared before his eyes.

_ Damn this medicine! _

Sherlock blinked hard, but the vision did not waver. His lungs contracted and would not refill with air. His eyes opened wide and wider, his mouth hung slack with disbelief.

In front of him was a man wearing blue scrubs, a stethoscope slung around his neck. Rigid posture, though he was not considerably tall. Short greyish-blond hair, soft blue eyes. Lines around those eyes, shadows beneath them, confusion within them. The knuckles of the hand that clutched back the curtain turned white, and all the color drained from his face. Sherlock saw him waver on the spot. His eyes went unfocused and his legs gave out beneath him, folding him into a heap on the floor.

The beeping – that incessant, incorrigible beeping – sounded in an erratic staccato, and Sherlock flung himself from the bed. He didn’t stop to think whether his legs would hold him, didn’t halt when the bags and machines and monitors that were connected to him rattled and snagged at the suddenness of his movement, didn’t care that his flimsy dressing gown was hanging from one bony shoulder, and not covering anything at all in regard to his posterior. 

All his thoughts fell away save for one, the first truly clear thought he’d had since he’d woken in hospital: 

_ John is here._

Sherlock dropped to the floor, kneeling above him. 

“John,” Sherlock said, not bothering to keep the panic out of his voice. He cradled the man’s head in his hand, poked at his neck for a pulse, spread his long fingers across his chest, batted at his cheek with his palm. 

“John!”

He stirred in Sherlock’s hands, and when John’s eyes found focus on his own, his heart leaped. 

“Sher–Sherlock?”

_ Oh._

Hearing his name in John’s voice after so long was the sweetest sound he could ever remember hearing before and, with all probability, would ever hear again. John looked worried, bewildered. Clearly the expression of a man who believed he’d set his eyes on some kind of apparition.

“Yes, John – it’s me,” Sherlock said reassuringly, though not without a quaver of traitorous emotion. “God, it’s me.”

John’s eyes roved over Sherlock’s battered face, as if he still didn’t quite believe it was him. He must look frightful to begin with; coming back from the dead certainly wasn’t going to help at all. John was still obviously struggling to figure out the orientation of his body between the floor and ceiling.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

Sherlock couldn’t help the smile that caught the end of his mouth. Such a simple question, with so many possible answers. He chose one that he felt had an appropriate depth of meaning to it.

“Lost,” he answered. 

Inside his mind he completed the thought.

_ Lost without you. _

**Author's Note:**

> Note well: this story has not been beta'd, I am not any kind of medical professional, and it has been inexpertly Brit-picked to the best of my ability. Apologies on all fronts.


End file.
